Source Apportionment of the El Paso Aerosol by Particle Class Balance Analysis

Abstract

A particle class balance analysis has been applied to ambient particulate samples from El Paso, Texas. Profiles of particle class mass fractions from 20 sources were previously developed using advanced pattern recognition methods. These source profiles show very low collinearity and were thus applied to apportioning the mass fractions of the particle class observed in ambient TSP samples. For TSP samples taken near the sources, excellent fits to the data were obtained. Sampling sites farther removed from the sampled sources showed much poorer quality fits. The results suggest that the large number of measured particle classes in the source profiles provides for greater resolution of sources than is generally possible with conventional hulk analysis of particle samples.